👟👠 Wow! A centenary! (#100!)

Hi ! Welcome back. Had enough chocolate? Today I am writing about 100 newsletters, lost wallets, lessons learnt, mountains climbed, old clothes and old movies - Eve D.❣️

I/We made it to 100 newsletter editions!!! 🥳 🥳 I started writing this almost exactly 2 years ago (April 6, 2024), and am quite frankly amazed that I have stuck with it consistently. Kudos to me! A lot of introspection about this milestone is below.

What I did this week:

💸 I lost my wallet. I was at a market, and my wallet was with me one second, and the next it wasn’t. I was remarkably stoic about it (a bit pissed off that I’d have to replace my cards and my drivers licence), but I did spend the morning thinking about karma. I cannot begin to tell you how many wallets I have found and returned, how many dogs I have chased down busy roads to save them from certain death and how many other good deeds I have gone out of may to fulfill. I couldn’t help but have a slight, nagging feeling that it was time to be paid back. Why could someone not find my wallet and return it? After hours of such philosophising, and probably prodding the Universe slightly….my wallet was returned! Woohoo! 

🖥️ I redid my Sneakers and Heels website (90% done). I am much happier with it. I still have to filter out/delete the old (stupid) posts, and rewrite the always-dreaded “About me” page, but overall I am quite pleased. The redesign is not just aesthetic, it’s also structural and introduces a significant shift in how I see myself writing in the future. I have alluded to this in the past, and think about it often: between the enshitification of social media, content explosion, attention scarcity and AI, what is the future of personal writing? As with almost everything these days the answer is: it depends. In this case, it depends on why someone is writing. Lucky for me, I am not doing it as a means to earn money. It’s more a form of necessary personal expression, with a bit of community building sprinkled on top. My new website design encourages quick, off the cuff thoughts to be posted, while also leaving space for more in-depth, introspective pieces. It’s those that I feel I need to start writing. Still figuring out the details, including when to actually do all this writing.

🐰 We had Easter lunch at my sister’s, and I took the opportunity to rope her, her partner and my two kids to climb our local koppie (mini-mountain) at 6:15am Easter Monday. And we did! What fun! It’s a remarkably difficult hike, but everyone managed to complete it and at the end of it my four fellow hikers went home while I…hiked it again. I had to, as part of my prep for the Leopard Trail. That second round was impossible. It was so hard. But I did it. I am rather proud of myself (not so much for completing the second round, but for starting it in the first place). 

⁉️ Speaking of Easter, kids and I had our annual Easter Day Family Quiz, where my kids compete for marshmallow eggs by answering quiz questions that I set. The questions are a mix of cultural trivia and family-related trivia. The latter makes for the best questions, and there are always a lot of laughs to be had. At the end of the quiz we tally up the eggs, declare the winner, and then divide the eggs equally between the two kids because that is just how they are wired. Sweet. 

🧥 I went to a thrift store for the first time in my life, and loved it!! There are such gorgeous pieces to be found. I can see this will become a favourite hobby of mine. I have now also been told of a local Vintage Market, so will definitely be checking that out asap. In related news: I gave most of my clothes away during a frenzied Covid-inspired house purge (no regrets), but have not replaced them since. And I’m starting to get the itch… I want to create a signature look of well chosen, co-ordinated items that are just the right amount of crazy and wild, and distinct enough so people can see an item in a shop window and say “that’s so Eve!”. On that note, I went to a mall for the first time in ages today, and all the clothes looked so boring and uninspired. Let the quest begin.

✈️ I landed some aeroplanes, as I say. Had my “off work” week, which was actually a pretty intense “catch-up-work” week (except for Thursday. Thursday I did nothing). Back to normal on Monday, except that I am still not done catching up and need another five days at least. So will have to figure that in somehow. By the way, when I say “catch-up”, I don’t just mean work stuff. There are so many niggly-wiggly things that need to be done in life too, that just get kicked down the road. Eventually they pile up and start causing problems. On the plus side, once handled, they give instant relief. Advice: that to-do you’ve been putting off for 28 weeks? It will probably take 15 minutes, and you’ll feel so much better once it’s done.

100 cheers to me…

100 newsletters! About 200,000 words! Equal to 2.5 books! To mark the occasion, my website now has a single page with links to all the past editions, should you….ever be very bored? Can we talk about how I made this Table of Contents? I could have copied each of the 100 titles and blurbs from their individual pages, pasted them into a document, added the hyperlink, and then formatted each entry individually. Or, I could have asked Claude to do it for me. And he (yes, it’s a personified he) could do it in 30 seconds flat. No brainer as to which option I chose. This was a genuine saving of hours. More specifically, it was a genuine creation of content that would otherwise not exist because I would never have taken the time to do it. So although I have never used AI to write anything that I have published, I do most definitely use it behind the scenes to do tasks like this (and lots and lots of other, much more clever stuff too). But that’s not for this newsletter, or this blog (hint! hint! re other things I am working on :-) ). Here is the ToC.

Anything new?

Given the 100-editions-milestone, I thought it would be interesting to read the first issue of this newsletter (written two years ago, almost to the day: April 6, 2024), and see how much my life has changed. It was a bit disappointing, shocking and eye-opening to see how much my life has not changed at all: almost every single issue I wrote about on that day, every point of interest, every goal and dream is still in place today. 

• 💐 I had just taken 2 weeks of work and loved it (exactly what I did this year, over the past two weeks); 

• 💐 I was thinking about my housing situation and where/how I want to live (exactly as I still am; my house is a big thorn in my side)

• 💐 I was writing about my favourite YouTuber Jenna and the start of her house renovation (exactly as I did a week ago! Two years ago Jenna was starting the renovation, this week she finally got her kitchen cabinets delivered. So…in the past two years she re-built a house and I …wrote 100 newsletters? Lol)  

• 💐 I had just resurrected my website/blog. (I’ve just done it again this week! Ha ha!) 

• 💐 I wanted to take up photography and post more photos. (Still so true, and haven’t done a thing about it! )

• 💐 Wanted to read 2 fiction books a month. (Still do, but this time I am at least exceeding my goal.) 

So at first glance, it might look like my life has stayed stagnant. But looks can be deceiving! My life might not have changed much, but it has expanded (kind of like the Universe!). As proof, please see the two remaining things I wrote about two years ago:

• I was “on a mission to get fit”. Specifically, I was “building up” to being able to walk for 45 minutes around my neighbourhood. 

• I wrote about how “every pot finds its lid” (still one of my favourite stories ever). In this particular case, it was literally about pots and lids, but I was also obviously being metaphoric too. And as you well know, this pot (me) has found her lid :-)

These two additions, hiking and G, are an essential, even foundational, part of my life. And also, not to be overlooked: they are very much connected to each other. Here, let me show you…In issue 15 of the newsletter I wrote:

In issue 22 I wrote:

(this was also the first issue G ever read. “Topsy-turvyed”! 😆 )

And of course, in exactly one month from today, G and I are going to walk 73 km together, or die trying. Which, I think we can all agree, is slightly more ambitious than my simple 2024 goal of “walking 45 minutes around the block”.

Lessons learnt?

Honestly, I don’t think the newsletter has taught me much at all during these last two years. Sure there are small things, like the fact that I now know can write consistently if I want to. I certainly have not learnt how to market and grow a personal newsletter, since I deliberately remove subscribers faster than I add them, and have no qualms about that at all. I also learnt I don’t need to monetize my hobbies. I’ve learnt/confirmed I thrive on validation and one-on-one interactions. I’ve learnt that I can churn out 2,000 words even if I think I don’t have more than fifty in me that day. I’ve learnt that although I care to find out what people think, I don’t care if their thoughts judge me. 

I guess what the last two years of writing have shown me is that I enjoy the process. I do thrive on challenges though, and this newsletter is no longer that challenging. I need to raise the stakes, set some audacious goals, and go pursue them. Thus far, this has been a quiet, gentle newsletter of me writing mostly for myself, and sharing with others. I think the next two years will see me expanding my writing footprint. We’ll see.

Hang up the phone…

What I watched:  

This week we watched Breakfast Club, which is 40 years old and a cult classic. Also, a movie I have never watched. I am not sure what I was expecting (I think it was something in the mood of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), so I was surprised by the (somewhat weird) storyline. It’s difficult to imagine the zeitgeist at the time of the movie’s launch, so not easy to understand why it had such an impact. Glad to check it off my list, though. Another movie I have never watched is Fight Club, so that’s my movie choice for two week’s time.

(It’s a little bit wild to see how The Breakfast Club cast has aged!)

Next week:

Back to normal life! Urgh!

Thanks for reading!

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